A Journey Through Social Change

In this memoir, renowned urban sociologist Gerald D. Suttles examines his own life with the same insights that produced The Social Order of the Slum, The Man-Made City, and Front Page Economics. Having understood so much about different kinds of people, Suttles knew he couldn't write about himself without writing about the worlds that made him. So he wrote what he called an ethnoautobiography or ethnography. Those who know his work will recognize some familiar themes: social control, cognitive maps, ordered segmentation, contrived communities, and so on. But in the foreground of it all is Gerry himself, a bright kid in the hills of Western North Carolina, a tough sailor on the U.S.S. Essex, a veteran looking for a way forward in civilian life, and finally a bright young sociologist on the brink of a distinguished career. In A Journey Through Social Change, Suttles shares how he thought of his entire life as a series of accidents, most of which turned out to be - as he put it - "dumb luck." But it's what you make of accidents that matters. And Gerry Suttles made the most of every one of them.